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Sunday, September 12th, 2004
Last night we watched "Duck Soup", which went over pretty well, I thought -- granted Sylvia was not much into it at all for the first hour or so, but when it hit the scene where Harpo is trying to convince Groucho that he is looking at his reflection in a mirror (instead of at Harpo), she was entranced. We watched that scene (Sylvia calling it "the Peek scene", as in "Peek-a-boo") about 3 times through, and once more this morning. Sylvia is a bit confused about why it is called "Duck Soup", when there were no ducks in the movie. Update: Sylvia was talking last night about a movie called "Duck Soup", in which a man is eating soup and then a duck climbs in, "and then there's a peeking part." Then she said "But I was mistaken -- that's wrong!"...
posted evening of September 12th, 2004: Respond
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Thursday, September second, 2004
Kaydi's mom Michele sent us some pictures of the 2 girls playing.
posted evening of September second, 2004: Respond
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Monday, August 30th, 2004
A new page in our family album: Summer Vacation, 2004.
posted evening of August 30th, 2004: Respond
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Saturday, August 14th, 2004
Tonight we watched "Wallace and Gromit: The Wrong Trousers". Sylvia gives it "lots of thumbs up!" -- highlights included "when they ride on the toy train" and "all of it!" That's all for a while -- Monday we'll be heading out of town for our vacation. We are spending the week in Sodom, NY, deep in the Adirondacks.
posted evening of August 14th, 2004: Respond
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Friday, August 13th, 2004
Tove Jansson is taking over my reading life... Yesterday I read the totally captivating book Moominsummer Madness in which the family's house is flooded out and they are forced to take refuge on a floating stage... They end up producing a tragedy written by Moominpappa, with help from a crabby stage rat, leading to her reunion with her Fillyjonk niece and other hijinks. This morning on the train coming in, Sylvia and I reread Chapter VI of Finn Family Moomintroll, the story of Thingumy and Bob. This afternoon I will start Moominvalley in November -- I am sorry there are only a few more Moomin books for me to read after this, but happy that they make such good re-reading matter.
posted afternoon of August 13th, 2004: Respond
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Thursday, August 12th, 2004
We got another Babar book this weekend, one of the originals by Jean de Brunhoff: Babar and Zephir. (Also got some more Moomin books, about which more later.) Sylvia loves it (Arthur and Zephir are her two favorite characters in Babar) and said last night that she wants to have it for her bedtime story every night.
posted morning of August 12th, 2004: Respond
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Sunday, August 8th, 2004
The saga of repairing my patio continues... The story so far: when we moved into this house it had a broken-up, uneven bluestone patio in the back yard, and I thought I would like to learn how to fix it, make it flat and even. Ellen's cousin Danny came over and offered to donate some slate flagstones he had in his side yard toward the cause. (At that point I thought the patio was made of slate.) After getting them home I realized they would not work in the back yard, and decided instead to build a walkway/garden border in the front yard. I did that last summer -- it came out really well (or at least "really well for a first masonry project by someone who didn't have much of a clue") and I had some slate left over. This spring I extended the walkway back past the side of our house, next to the garage. And I was ready to start on the patio itself! So two weeks ago I drove down to Brick, NJ, where there is Bedrock Stone, excellent stone yard that I recommend wholeheartedly. Bought a pallette of 1 1/2" rectangular bluestone and a pallette of broken bluestone pieces; and on the way home I stopped at Maplewood Garden Supply to get 3 cubic yards of bluestone dust. (Note: the dump truck which brought the dust would not have been able to get into our back yard, were it not for the new gate I built. Nice feeling.) That stuff has been sitting in our driveway for the past 2 weeks; and when my father came to town this weekend, I asked if he'd like to help me work on the patio. He was game, and we completed the work I was hoping to get done -- namely, the narrow part of the patio (4' X 27') that runs from the driveway to the main patio. This part had previously been extremely broken up -- hence the new flag stones -- and repaired in patches with slate. We put in a layer of dust to even the ground beneath it, and laid in new stones, and built a low border from the broken stone pieces. The old flag stones that I could salvage are stacked in the driveway, waiting to be used in extending the main part of the patio back into the yard a little ways, which may happen as soon as this fall. First I need to get to evening up the main part of the patio, where the stones are mostly whole or else cleanly broken, so I will be able to use the existing stones. (This is good because they are 1" thick and thus possible for me to lift without a second person.) That will be happening at the end of the month, if all goes according to plan.
posted evening of August 8th, 2004: Respond
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Friday, August 6th, 2004
Have not blogged about this yet but I've been reading an excellent book, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg. Hogg is a 19th-C. Scot who uses the religious and political strife of late 17th-C. Scotland to paint a disturbing picture of the human soul afflicted by zealotry. Essentially the story of an ardent Calvinist who takes the doctrine of Predestination a bit farther than it is useful... Rather more relevant to our own troubled times than I would prefer.
posted morning of August 6th, 2004: Respond
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Sunday, August first, 2004
As Sylvia was looking through Finn Family Moomintroll last week, asking me who the characters in each of the pictures were, she became enchanted with Thingumy and Bob, two diminutive characters who hold hands. I don't know whether it's mainly because of their names, which she finds highly amusing and loves to repeat, or the pictures -- the two taken together make these her new favorite characters. We've taken to reading Chapter VI together, which starts off with a picture of the Hemulen offering them a saucerful of milk -- at first she tried reading it to herself, coming up with: "There is a first time for everything. It was Thingumy and Bob's first time going to the doctor." and so on, I didn't catch the details of their doctor visit -- she modeled this story on on of her favorite Berenstein Bears books. But later she asked me to read the story; I was thrilled and a little surprised to see that it held her attention all the way through the end of the chapter (which must run 10 or 12 pages), though with 2 short pieces snipped out à la The Princess Bride. I had the book along with me yesterday when we rode on the train to Coney Island and this morning coming back, nearly 4 hours in all, and we must have read it through 5 or 6 times, enough for her to know what is coming next in the plot and what the characters are going to say. The trip to Coney Island was our first-ever overnight trip without Mom, and it was a lot of fun. We stayed over at Ed's apartment in Park Slope; I got to meet Ed's girlfriend Sonia, and lent him Tales from Moominvalley. Sylvia got her fill of rides -- various metal animals that would go up and down in circles, and we rode the Tilt-a-Whirl together -- and had a good time at the aquarium.
posted evening of August first, 2004: Respond
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Wednesday, July 28th, 2004
Last week we went to the NJ State Aquarium in Camden, with Sylvia's friend Kimberlee and her parents (who were part of our travel group to China). Here are some pictures of the girls hamming it up on the aquarium grounds.
posted evening of July 28th, 2004: Respond
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